Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Romcoms are hard in a lot of ways: they’re built to be buoyant. It’s easy to demean them.

People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

When I was a kid, I had a tendency to criticize. But when I did, my mum would whisk me off to the bathroom to stand in front of a mirror. Ten minutes, never less. To think about how criticism is a poor reflection on the one who criticizes.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

Someone once asked me, ‚How long does it take to do your hair.‘ I said, ‚I don’t know, I’m never there.‘

I laugh and joke, but I don’t get distracted very easily.

When you’re in comedy, people always come up and say, ‚Oh, it must be so hard.‘ It really isn’t hard unless you’re not good at it. If you can do it, its really kind of fun and easy.

He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.

I know I’m more on television, and I’m more recognisable than maybe even the players because they run and train, but I just stand there, and my face does all these funny things that everyone can see all the time.

If at first you don’t succeed… so much for skydiving.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

It’s sometimes comical to hear the younger generation ask their peers to repeat themselves.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

I find it amusing that I’m on the Internet now, because I’ve criticized it, but mainly I’ve criticized it on the basis of, ‚What are you going to do with it?‘

But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.

I think the 24-hour news cycle has helped exaggerate the differences between the parties. You can always find someone on TV somewhere carping about something. That didn’t happen 20 years ago.

I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory.

Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar.

It doesn’t matter what temperature the room is, it’s always room temperature.

The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes.

Chris Rock does the political thing really well, but that never worked for me.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

An unemployed court jester is nobody’s fool.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

I do all my own stunts. I’m kidding.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

There’s something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she’s only measured water in it.

You can’t trample infidels when you’re a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.

I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In ‚The Colour of Magic‘ most of the city is set alight. It’s a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams’s ‚The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.‘

I guess if I’m a product, either you’re chocolate, you’re vanilla or you’re butterscotch. You can’t be all three.

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.

When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse. I could be a mayor.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

My success comes in making fun of whatever you’re doing. That’s my way.

I’m skeptical that the novel will be ‚re-invented.‘

I tend not to like an awful lot of what is going out under my name now because it is just all product. Who needs it?

Especially when you’re at a high level in an organization, criticism can be devastating to an employee. I prefer to praise employees for what they’re doing right, and it tends to lead to them doing more of the same. Not always, but it’s the way I choose to bet.

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

It’s a good thing we don’t get all the government we pay for.

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possible go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent.